Los Angeles – May 7, 2013 – Jumpstart, the global research and design laboratory for Jewish innovation – and which recently celebrated its fifth birthday – has announced that it has partnered with Rimona Consulting, creators of the Jewish startup wiki-map Jewnovations and the Jewish crowdfunding platform, Jewcer. Jewnovations has become a Jumpstart program and will be integrated with its existing resources for social entrepreneurs and funders of Jewish innovation. Rimona Consulting will make its crowdfunding expertise available to all of Jumpstart’s fiscally sponsored projects through the Jewcer platform, amplifying their ability to leverage broad-based support for their work.

Launched in 2012, Jewnovations is the first-ever global map of new Jewish initiatives, built on a GoogleMaps API that allows project leaders and their constituents to create partnerships, share resources, and exchange information. Jumpstart’s acquisition of Jewnovations fulfills its longstanding aim, with the support of a Jewish Peoplehood Innovation Grant from the NADAV Foundation, to establish an online clearinghouse of new Jewish organizations, projects, and initiatives in order to facilitate increased investment, collaboration, and community-building throughout the sector.

Irina Nevzlin Kogan, who led the creation of the Nadav Foundation Peoplehood Innovation Grant program, commented, “We invested in the innovation database because we believe creative Jewish leaders around the world should know and learn from one another. Our shared peoplehood and individual communities are strengthened by such relationships. The collaboration between Rimona Consulting and Jumpstart brings the idea to a new level. In particular, the Jewcer funding platform is a much-needed tool that can generate real benefits for users. I look forward to seeing what the partnership yields.”

Jumpstart has engaged Rimona to develop the next generation of the Jewnovations platform in order to give funders of Jewish innovation an easy-to-use interface for doing research on potential grantees and an understanding of what is happening in the sector as a whole and, more broadly, to provide the Jewish nonprofit world with a repository for organizations that are doing innovative work, developing next-generation best practices and transforming how Jewish community is built in the 21st century.

Commenting to eJP about this new partnership, Wharton Professor Kevin Werbach, co-author of For The Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business and co-creator of the world’s first course on gamification at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that the social innovation world has yet to take full advantage of gamification. “Jumpstart could help put the Jewish community ahead of the curve” with this partnership, he said. “There’s great potential in platforms that leverage crowdsourcing and gamification beyond contests, points, badges, and leaderboards.”

The partnership brings together the entrepreneurial creativity of Rimona founders Dr. Amir Give’on and Naomi Leight with Jumpstart founders Joshua Avedon and Shawn Landres and will amplify each organization’s capacity to increase the visibility of and funding for new Jewish initiatives around the world.

Comments

Great question, Anna. The key difference is that Jewnovations is a database/map of new initiatives, not a fundraising platform (as JGooders was). Any new Jewish initiative (intrapreneurial or entrepreneurial, nonprofit, foundation, or social business) can be listed. Initiatives will be free to list any fundraising or crowdraising portal they wish.

Thanks, Anna for your question. As a co-founder of Jewcer.com, I can tell you we are very different from what JGooders was trying to accomplish, which was just fundraising for Jewish causes. We at Jewcer know that crowdfunding is a tool for community engagement and empowerment, not merely a fundraising mechanism and we also provide the educational program and advising on how to run a crowdfunding campaign to build your community, get them to participate in your idea, and get your idea funded. Since we launched just a year ago we’ve helped more than 40 projects reach more than 60,000 people and raise more than $230,000. We’d love to chat with you more if you have any questions, just reach out to us at info@jewcer.com.

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